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Little spirals of lint and puffs of dander were caught in the harsh-angled light of the setting sun. A stainless steel coffee machine burbled. Patches of soda syrup caught the bottoms of shoes as the guests left the diner. The tile floor was a moon-grey clay, with wounds of particle board showing through. The diner was busy for 7 PM. The dinner guests should have been leaving, and the truckers would show up one by one, whenever.

Monguez Bacitracin was the manager that night, and he didn’t like the vibes in the air. There was typically a rhythm to a Friday night like this. The families would come because kids under five ate for free, and then they’d file out by about 6:00 or 6:30. Something weird was happening tonight. Not so much families, as couples, trios, even odd quartets inhabited the booths and tables here tonight. Monguez excused himself out behind the restaurant and had a cigarette. It was a Camel Wide. He smoked it and looked at the big green dumpster that was for some reason fenced in behind a miniature wall. A seagull was perched on the corner of the wall. “Fuck your crenellations,” it seemed to say, ” I’m getting into this garbage. I fucking love garbage.” Monguez took a drag, and watched the seagull stamp around on that cinderblock wall. We don’t have enough workers tonight, he thought. This is gonna be one of those nights.

Just then, Marigold Bricker walked into the front door of the diner. She was not the manager, but the waitress that everyone new went to with their questions. She’d been punching that time card for about fifteen years. She took one glance over the dining area and curled her lips. It was all tourists. Tonight was gonna suck. She swung her backpack off into the conference room/break room/extra bun storage area in the back, expertly tied her smock, and waded out into the minefield.

TABLE ONE –

Empty.

TABLE TWO –

Kolber Plantoon, a 45 year old failed actor, still living on the inheritance he got from his mother.
Ziggy Compartment, a 21 year old man, convinced that his extroverted nature will garner success.

Kolber: “That’s why Brando was so good. He took the high artform of acting and brought it low. Brought it down to where everyone was really living. He didn’t do the mid-atlantic accent, he didn’t project to the back row of the theater. He actually spoke like people do in real life,”

Ziggy: ” Oh my gosh, that’s so cool. Do you think, like, he ever-“

Kolber: “Not interested, nope, hey, I’m not-“

Ziggy: “No, I know! But just wait! I know you don’t like hypotheticals, but do you think. Okay. Hmm. What do you think Marlon Brando would think about Skibbidi toilet? Do you like me yet?”

TABLE THREE –

Augle Guarrementae, the consummate beancounter, a born beauraeucrat.
After Ploogsman, a punk rock prostitute

After: I heard Monguez was thinking about selling this whole place. I think he owns like a third of it, and he’s gonna sell it off.

Augle: He probably couldn’t do that unless he owned a controlling share.

After: Well, whatever, I don’t know, fuck.

She pinches her cigarette out into the ashtray like time pinches us all into corpses.

Augle: I like Microsoft Excel. It’s a great program. You can write macros and input data and then it all works out. Plus, it feels really nice when a man enters my body, sexually.

After says: Yeah, I think you are a quirky man and that’s why I’m giving you attention.

TABLE FOUR-

Empty.

TABLE FIVE –

Hoof McDermott came swaggling along. His cowboy hat looked like that of a saint, and his bloodsoaked jeans were those of demons. He picked catttails from rivers and stuck ’em in his lips like you or I breathe. “What’s up with the diner t’night, miss?” he grumbled. And then the whole place went crazy.

TABLE SIX –

Empty.

TABLE SEVEN –

Finch Appledouble, the most dedicated custodian you will ever meet, stood with arms akimbo at the scene in the diner. He recalled a lifetime, seventy years of experience that didn’t mete out to a big toilet bowl full of fucking diarrhea. He curled his white mustache and frowned, never having thought about just quitting his job. You gotta work. How else is you s’posed to earn your keep?

???

TABLE EIGHT –

Pongo If: It’d be nice if this was Armageddon. Then you would feel like there was some significance to the sourful deadliness that happens every day. But it’s not. The end of the world has already started, but it will happen so slowly. Perhaps we’d be free of the re·spon·si·bil·i·ty of the thing if we just got to watch it.
Uncle Mondo: Yeah, I don’t care. Would you like to eat some biscuits and gravy?

Something wicked this way comes. I’m thinking we should all just chill for a minute. Let’s bring it down a bit. Relax,

I’d rather not be one of the cranky old fuckers that thinks the younger generation is just plain wrong. It’s a song as old as time. Socrates or Aristotle or one of those old gay queens has a quote about how the younger generation listened to weird music and didn’t respect their elders. That’s from like 3000 years ago. Every generation bellyaches about their immediate successors. I’d like to think I’m aware enough to understand that the kids born after me have a different worldview, a different experience than I did coming up. Right, right on. I get it. They won’t like the same things, their music might be something else, whatever. Frankly, I never felt an intrinsic need to respect my elders. Don’t be an asshole to me, I won’t be an asshole to you. My music was different than the Top 40 hits today. Totally get that stuff.

I am concerned about the kids though. This “artificial intelligence” stuff seems to be an overly important thing in their lives. Now, hypocritical as I’ll ever be, I used the internet machine to try to find out a couple of facts. The AI-assisted results told me that 70% of Gen Z uses ChatGPT and also that 57% of Zoomers aspire to be an influencer for their career.

This seems somewhat dire to me.

However, I will try to examine this in a way that does not make me just a crabby old fucker. Not a white-bearded, whiskey-drunk misanthrope, shouting at the children at the nearby bus stop to stay away from my acorns, because them squirrels is my friends. You got it?

The “artificial intelligence” that we have access today is just a refined search algorithm that speaks in English syntax back to you. That’s really all it is. I mean, Google had this shit like ten years ago but they didn’t package it in the way that it seemed like another person or entity was responding. If you typed in “That one movie where women couldn’t have babies anymore”, it would just show results for “Children of Men” as a list of links. Now, if you asked ChatGPT, it says “Oh yeah! Children of Men, starring Clive Owen. What a great film! I especially like the use of handheld cameras and the long shots in it,” It’s basically just you inputting a sentence, and then it will take the keywords in it, search, and then spit the results back in a MadLibs style response in the form of a sentence. It will grab nouns, adverbs, and verbs and fill them in where necessary to reply in the form of a human sentence. This is enough to trick half the fucking planet into thinking that it’s sentient or something. It just grabs more information from the sources it has been fed and spits it out in a grammatically correct way. This is how people personify it. It’s “talking back”. Not just giving me a list. Wowzers! It is incapable of insight, because it is an aggregator of previously recorded information. It will grab the most commonly used information first, and so it is a softening of the boundaries of knowledge and will always puddle into lowest common denominator. It “learns” on all the media that has been fed into it, and will act as a blender, taking the information and slurrying it into a slop you can drink, but it “talks” back like it knows something.

Now some dinghole who loves the new “AI” might be asking me “Well, BeardBiteMan, how is that any different than human sentience? Isn’t consciousness just a complex search algorithm that takes in new stimuli and juxtaposes it to an existing database to produce a response?!” To which I will say simply “Fuck you. Kind of.”

But I will grant myself this thing: I can say that “AI” is not sentient without having an airtight definition of human sentience. Because this is pretty much the basis of several different disciplines of philosophy, psychology, neuro-sexual-discography, etc. It is the essential human question. And when that little smartass René Descartes thought he nailed it, everybody dogpiled on him.

I do think that for an artificial intelligence to really have consciousness, it would need to have a body. It would need to have somatic experience with sensory information to process. A computer today can have lots of information loaded into it, but it has no volition to seek anything. It can’t discover a novelty, a new thing. AND YOU CAN’T pretend that an AI that gets to read the internet can do it, because that is a recounting of other peoples’ information. It would have to walk around in a town, or a wood, or a wooded town. It would have to see things that others have not reported already. And in having a physical form, it would understand intimacy, death. Perhaps it would see a robin watching it back from a tree branch, and it would not record it. It would just experience it.

These kids offer over their intelligence, their understanding of the world to ChatGPT and Grok and whatever other dumb shit. I dunno. When the written word first shot out into the world with the printing press, there were worries about books making up crazy fantasies in peoples’ heads. Television was thought to be a powerful new devil in movies like Videodrome and Network. Those were mediums where you just consumed the thing. You engaged with it, and it had an effect. Now you talk to it, and it talks back. It talks back so singularly. It’s got access to your internet cookies. It will know you so intimately.

My message to the kids using Chat GPT to complete their homework is this: Wouldn’t you rather figure it out? Understand it? Because if you’re just trying to coast onto easiness, why are you alive, bitch? Why? You can do it. Life’s really rewarding if you challenge yourself sometimes.

he speaks a hoarse glossolalia
whiskey cloud arm-gesture theatrics
by the mailbox at the corner
and his eyes are inkwells stabbed by red lightning
and his hair is coarse burrs spilling from a winter hat

I stopped to grab a feather off the sidewalk
It was a beautiful golden and black piece of her
a part of a goldfinch’s wing

His sermon rattled from his throat
A paean to long forgotten gods

The god of the space between stars
The god of candle wax and ink
The god of dragonflies and shallow water
The god of sidewalks and scraped knees

And he spoke the continuum of the woman in Delphi
Those girls in Salem
Speech outside of the paradigm
So the cops showed up and shot him in the head

And the feather from that goldfinch lives in my wallet now
pressed between my debit card and my insurance card

Ghouls, Creeps, and Mutants

I was part of a special task force from 2014 to 2019. I’ve never told anyone about this, not even my closest friends and family. This was a black ops deal, so I probably am not supposed to disclose this information, but I feel like it’s too important to keep secret.

I was recruited in the spring of 2014. The man who would eventually be my commanding officer showed up to my apartment and knocked on my door. A man that I will only ever know by his codename: Goodbean Frill. He was dressed in a smart, tight-fitting three piece suit. His eyes were mismatched. One was a pale blue glacier, the other was copper in color. His long white hair was bunched in a messy ponytail. His angular face was framed by white muttonchops.

Goodbean spoke before the door was even fully opened, “Mark, my boy. How are you?”

“Uh, I’m okay, I guess. Uh-“

“Good! Great to hear. We’ve been monitoring your video games,” he started as he let himself into my home, breezing his lanky leg past the door. “Yesterday you won your fourth Super Bowl in a row in Madden, right?” He pursed his lips in a descending note whistle.

I staggered back a step or two, “Yeah…I did,”

Goodbean continued “And then, correct me if I’m wrong, but you also beat level 103 on Earth Defense Force just, uh, what was it? Last week?” I crossed my arms as Goodbean glanced around my apartment. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Why-, who are-?”

He produced a badge from his pocket. It was gold and had a strange insignia. ” Commander Goodbean Frill, of the F.E.U.,” He saw me scrunch up my eyebrows and open my mouth, then interjected ” Save your breath. Freak Extermination Unit.”

I started “Okay, Freak Extermination Unit. And you’ve been watching me…play video games?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We watch everybody.” He tapped his cane against a framed photo of Rosie O’Donnell I had hanging on the wall at this point. He had a cane, I think I forgot to mention that. “We put those games out there as a test.”

Goodbean continued ” Your prowess at Madden shows a great strategic and tactical capacity. And to couple that with skill at Earth Defense Force? A game about shooting giant bugs and aliens? Rolling around on the battlefield while emptying a machine gun? You’re the perfect prospect. You’re exactly what we’re looking for.”

I farted silently but very odorously at this point, and walked across the room to maybe try to obfuscate the fact that I just about shit my pants. ” So you’re recruiting people who are good at these two specific video games?”

“Exactly, my boy,” Goodbean replied. ” And you’re just the kind of boy we’re looking for. Our organization keeps the world in working order. We are charged with the same noble task as the Knights Templar, the Jesuits, and the disciples of all holy things.”

I subtly waved my hand to try to fan the fart toward the kitchen, “Hot in here, huh? Anyway, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“The F.E.U. needs you, son. The anamolies are out there, in the world, and we need brave men to guard the gates. To keep the world safe from ghouls, creeps, and mutants. Did you just fart a few seconds ago? It smells like diarrhea in here.”

Almost like watching myself from outside my body, I drew my right hand up to my forehead into a salute. “Sir,” I said, “I’m all in. I’m gonna be the best damned F.E.U. soldier you ever had. And I didn’t fart. I think this house just kinda smells like diarrhea. It’s a cheap place. I think some poop is just like, marinating in the floorboards or something. The neighbors said there was an old couple who lived here before. So I probably think-“

“Excellent! Welcome to the F.E.U!” Goodbean shouted.

The next six months of my life were pretty standard F.E.U. recruit fare; running 4 kilometers (clicks) each morning at the crack of dawn, summoning djinn and interrogating them with a Ouija board, firing machine guns into cardboard cutouts of various kaiju. Pretty standard stuff for paranormal units. This one Mormon kid named Geoff went crazy and cut his own head off in the mess hall. He used a serrated grapefruit spoon. It was impressive in a way. But y’know, we all kinda saw it coming.

My first mission happened in the spring of 2015. A class 2 vampanzee was rooting around in the dumpster behind a plasma donation center. A vampanzee is a chimpanzee who has become a vampire. They have really sharp teeth and more often than not wear a little black cape. This one was capeless, though. My team executed the plan flawlessly. We surrounded the dumpster and then just shot the demon monkey with our machine guns until he was a puddle of red pulp. It was really fun and cool.

About 18 months later, I was stationed at the F.E.U. Observation Tower. It is a 150 foot tall spire that overlooks the ‘Bottomless Pit’ that sinks deep into the Antarctican ice. The F.E.U.O.T. is made of wood gathered from maple trees, as it seems to have a dampening effect against the psychic powers the ocotopi down there have. Each day, my comrades and I would play cards and shoot the shit, watching into the abyss below us intermittently. The psychic octopi would mill around, but never crest the surface. That was the agreement that JFK made with them. They abided by it for a long time. Until one day the octopi breached the surface and began clamboring up the maplewood observation tower. It was utter chaos.

They attacked us. Their psionics were dimmed by the maple, but not completely shut off. The weak-minded F.E.U. rookie, Arthur Rodriguez, bless him, got mindcaptured and started firing on us. I kicked him in the nuts and threw him off the edge of the tower. He landed with a bloody pulse on the snow below. Poor little guy. The purple suction cups of the octopi popped furiously over the wood and when they crested the crenellations of the tower, they seemed to hang in the air for a second. Their red and gold eyes were galaxies of hatred. I shot them with my machine gun. Purple blood bloomed into the air with each pulse of the gun, and it crystallized into snow in the Antarctic air.

After the battle, my second in command, Drey Kolingo, asked me “Man, do you really think the pit is bottomless? “

“Probably not,” I put a hand on his shoulder.

Kolingo stared at me, tears welling into the bottom of his eyelids. His lips quivered as he said “Rodriguez fell. He fell all the way down. And I can’t stop thinking about how he could’ve fallen forever. Could have been us. Me or you…”

“You still got that trail mix?” I asked. He had really good trail mix earlier in the day.

Kolingo scoffed “Man, I’m trying to be real with you. We just saw a man die, one of our brothers. He fought bravely, and we can’t even talk about it, because this fucked up job is-“

I pressed my finger to his lips. Interrupted him. “Trail mix? Do. You. Have. That. Trail. Mix?”

2019 was a rough year for me. I knew I was closing in on retirement from the F.E.U., and the Bigfoot Alliance was trying to smear my reputation. They claimed I took nude photos of sasquatches and distributed them on the internet. Ludicrous. First off, they are very hard to photograph. Better photographers than I have tried endlessly to snap a pic and have failed. Secondly, they don’t wear clothes, so they would necessarily be nudes, right? It was all political bullshit.

Goodbean came and visited me after I resigned my position. He was much more frail, feebler. His skin was like a faint paper over his veins and bones. His skeleton was much more visible, pressing through him. “Glad I got to know you,” I said to him. Not sure where I was gonna go next with my words. He lifted his head up. Smiled. “We go back a long ways,” I grinned back, “Thanks for everything.”

He nodded a little bit. A weak smile. Exhaled. Sleep found him easily. He was prepared.

There’s a whistling in the pines
a sound without cheer that travels like saline
down into the tearducts of the mountain
The needles on the extremities of the branches, boughs
They sing high-pitched and
Let the notes tumble down into the banks of the
cool river as it burbles and hums along
captured in a flow of silt and I

Watch and touch to feel
extremitus
of eyes and fingers and sensible work shoes
sucking in mud and muck and tiny sand beads

Sun bakes my flesh, ultraviolet light snapping tiny protein bonds
My animal muscle arms wheeling the oar, snapping tiny protein bonds
Beefstick in my belly, stomach acid snapping tiny protein bonds
Let’s go!

The water floats mirages
The constancy lies in some faraway landmark
Sandbar, tree, log
There’s a holiness here in the silence, the motions, the way we move
It’s iterated in generations of long ago
It feels like a faraway landmark
Splayed and dissected by the words I can array in my schema
Like Thunder and Woman and Meat
and like laugh and disenchanted and microscopy
Sandbar, tree, log
Father, home, night

Anhedonia comes easy to a skeptic,
and doubt pumps blood in the valleys of my conspiratorial brain
But it all seems too frail, too sugarwire framed
out here in the scrying mirror
of water lapping against
my way and future
The branches can sway and roar emerald
The river still moves

I was at Olive Garden the other day, and I coined a new phrase: Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is a part of going out to eat at a restaurant. It’s when you have eaten enough to be full, however, there is still a considerable amount of food left on your plate. But it is too scant to be worth taking home as leftovers. Just about a half of a lunch. But it is also too much to just leave on the plate, because you’d feel like you were wasting food. So you feel an obligation to dutifully shovel those last four or five bites into your mouth, even though you already know you will be drowsy and somewhat uncomfortable from overeating. As you shovel those forkfuls into your mouth, you are rounding Mammon’s Corner.

Mammon’s Corner is very much about trying to extract maximal value out of a consumer experience. You are trying to get your money’s worth, and not waste this exchange. If you are too full, and you leave the excess serving on the plate, you overpaid. If you take the leftovers home and try to make a small meal of them, you are shorting yourself a full consumptive experience.

Somehow, it got me thinking about how we fashion our identities around our consumer choices. We have brand loyalties, imagine ourselves to be this or that kind of shopper. It’s incredible that in every type of commodity, there is a gradient of cost and fanciness. Every modern American has a car, and although all of them just take us from place to place, there is a hierarchy of cheap dirtbag car to sophisticated important car. Less complex things have tiers of value. Toilet paper. Literally the thing you use to scrape fecal matter off of your shitty bunghole. There is single-ply truckstop poor people tier paper, and then there is the cushy, luxurious triple-ply ass paper with aloe vera infused in every wipe. Is there anything you can buy that is just universal? This is the basic thing that people need: Here it is.

No.

It’s incredible how much consumerism shapes our thoughts. We adhere to tiers of value for utterly inconsequential shit. A rug on the floor. A television stand. The brand of beans someone offers for Taco Night. This is the freedom we speak so highly of; to be standing in the toothpaste aisle and to see seventy different tubes of the same shit.

Somehow, I feel like I’d be remiss without talking about the Mormons.

How could there not be a new religion, seeing this vast westward expanse unfurling before you? How could there not be a new dogma of God and Christ, once the telescopes looked out over the planets of Mars and Venus? God is real, yeah, but he lives on another planet. The Garden of Eden exists; it’s in Missouri. What an enchanting time to be alive, what an All-American way to taste the Gospels. What excuse would you have to not be thriving here on planet earth? The project of god is clearly the settlement of this land of plenty. Nevermind the Indians, they are just weird or whatever! But to inherit a new half of the world and to understand that the cosmos contained many more places like our world…man. Mormons just picked up on the vibe of the time.

I’d love to be some kind of ascetic, if only for the cred. I can’t do it. I can’t help it. I’m a consumer piece of shit like everybody else. I love hamburgers too much. I guess I’d just like it if we all understood the commonality that we’ve all got. We’re just here temporarily, we’re dead with the days counting down. If you puff out your chest about being important, you’re a big dumb loser. Our pupils are black and will turn blacker on that big day. Nobody wrote a poem about your money. Nobody wants to remember you. You’re the most common and you’re boring.

Mammon will eat a lot of chicken alfredo.

Ten years ago, on Easter Sunday, two of my best friends died.

In the decade since, I’ve lived several lives. Different homes, jobs, driving a lot. Thinking out loud to myself on highways through Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa. I was this person, and that one, too. Cut my hair, trimmed my beard. Looked in a mirror and watched myself grow up. I live 180 miles away from where I did back then. I have a fiancé, a house, a yard that I mow with an electric mower. Cats and a dog that I feed and pet and look in their eyes.

Two of my best friends died, and each life I live holds onto that. I can’t help it. It’s a wound that has never quite healed.

It feels bad and I don’t like it.

I miss my friends. It is sharp on weekend afternoons, when I’d like to see them. When we would daydrink and chainsmoke and listen to punk rock music. Hit golf balls. Watch the 1960s Batman show while drinking coffee and make jokes. I remember the last time we hung out. We were sitting in an El Camino and smoking weed and watching the moon. It slowly climbed over the clouds. It didn’t feel like a Last Time, but why would it? It was another great memory in a growing anthology. But now that book is closed. It has all been written. I’m sad.

I’ve talked to each of them after they died.

Cory came to me in a dream, a couple of weeks later. In the dream, I was sitting in my car on my lunchbreak, smoking cigarettes. Nothing remarkable. He knocked on the passenger side door and asked to come into the car. “Yeah, dude, yeah!” I said. He told me he was kind of fading in and out between the world and something else. Which is weird, right. That’s more like how he would phrase it, and not how I would think of it. In my dreambrain. He said he was okay. I woke up and felt like it was significant.

Not long ago, I had a very weird dream. I was on an airplane, and as we were about to take off the stewardesses suddenly had all of us get out of the plane and go back into the airport, because something was wrong mechanically with the plane. We were all milling about in the boarding area, very agitated, and then I saw my old friend Tyler. He was heavily scarred, covered in blood. I think that was my brain reminding me he was dead? And I was like “Oh shit, man. So good to see you!” and we laughed and cracked wise for a couple of minutes and I said to him ” You know we all still love the hell out of you, we give you shit a bit, but everybody loves you,” and he was crying and smiling. He was happy and sad.

Ten years evaporates so quickly. I learned to be bold. To kiss her when the moment feels right. Courage in the moment. I’m a person still. A lot of the ink in my story was scribed by these friends. I was made in a rural Wisconsin manor. I hear punk rock music when I walk down a sidewalk. I’m so glad I knew them.

I’ll never meet people like that again.

she returned to her home deep in night
the familiar form of the house striking somehow foreign, ominous
interior was black and occluded, a single light bulb on the porch
burning all of its 80 watts into a corona over the steps

she held her keyring like a weapon, as she’d been taught
long key tucked between the forefinger and the middle
in case she had to stab somebody with it

She unlocked the door hurriedly,
Into the mudroom and slammed the door behind her,
locking the handle as it closed
Darkness there, and nothing more?

The windows were left open

Chilled and damp, like the morning was uninvited
something outside slithered into her home
and the kind of air that doesn’t belong indoors
felt like dew on the countertops and doorframes

Room to room, she switched the light on to check
and then switched it off behind her
Trepidation in the misty spring
She switched the light on in her bedroom and stood there
Waiting, maybe
Checking
a few minutes

When the coast was clear, she changed into her pajamas and crawled into bed. Pulled heavy blankets over her body. She fell asleep.

The night was alive with sickle-eyed cats.
Creatures ambling along fenceposts and knowing the moon
so much more intimately than the sun

She woke the next morning, feeling rested
A coffee on the porch
The sun was red and low behind the neighborhood homes
it drank slowly
The cool, damp night had left her bedroom
And caught a current of breeze,
to the place where cats look when they chase imaginary things

It is the far-flung future: The Year 2031. Ever since The Anomaly appeared between the Earth and the Moon, things have been fucked. The affairs of humanity have been scattered to the wind, much like the mercury-rich dust of the Florida Desert. The best laid plans of mice and men have been cornholed into oblivion.

We all noticed The Anomaly at different times. It overlaid the moon, seeming to stay perfectly centered between our world and our natural satellite. It took the form of a glowing, blood-red dodecahedron. Well, at least to the human eye. If you looked up in the sky, night or day, toward the moon in whatever phase it was in, there was The Anomaly. An unnerving red geometry, seeming to pulse with your own breathing patterns. But it was completely undetectable by all of our scientific instruments. Spectrometers, radio telescopes, hell, even everyday cameras would show no sign of it. It was invisible to everything but the naked human eye. Regardless, it sat like a wound in the sky, pulsing crimson to everyone who dared behold it.

Since it’s inauspicious but undeniable appearance, the world has gone kittywampus six ways from Sunday.

The oceans have become a murky greyish goop. Mountains have become pockmarked and granular, particulating into little more than oversized anthills. Wisdom teeth are just gone; dentists have lost a major revenue stream. The First World governments have collapsed. It was spectacular and almost instantaneous once The Anomaly took hold of the world. Heads of state tried to give serious addresses to their terrified constituents, but their words tended to lose meaning once their teeth transformed into earthworms as they spoke. It was mostly moist slapping noises, which are not exactly reassuring to a panicked populace.

Now, speaking as one of the unlucky ones who lived through the Change, I can report on the current state of things here in the Divided States of America. I have been tirelessly chronicling the characteristics, origins, and lore of the gangs that now rule North America. I think of myself as a scribe. An instrument of History, cautiously optimistic that humanity will eventually have a need for records. From New New York, to New Los Angeles, I have been studying the gangs of the end times.

CHRIST’S ARMY

Demographic: Previous Evangelicals, who are super-psyched about the state of things. Formerly well-to-do white Southerners who feel like they’re a whisker away from vindication.
Strength: Great in numbers, but mostly overweight and elderly.
Stronghold: The formerly affluent suburbs around Atlanta.
Weakness: Putting up a sign that says “Free McRibs this way!” with an arrow pointing toward a cliff. They will walk of the edge of the cliff every time and then fall to their death while asking to speak to a manager.

THE DOG TOWN BARKERS

Overview: The employees of various dog shelters and pet stores, who because of The Anomaly have been merged with their dog counterparts. Half-human, half-dog humanoids.
Strength: Being very alert. Barking at anyone who approaches their stronghold, especially mailmen.
Treats: Yes please.
Territory: Wherever they manage to pee, after sniffing around for rival gangs, and then pissing right on top of their marker. That’ll show ’em. This is MY yard. MINE.

SILENCE COVEN

Racial Bias: No.
Philosophy: That we should have probably anticipated that subjective reality would overwrite the objective.
Powers: Creating an interminable paranoia in those who are not initiated.
Weakness: Communication. They’re silent, after all.

NAMELESS BABY ARMY

MAKEUP: Not so much a gang but an inchoate horde of marauding babies. A force of nature comprised of 0-3 year old humans, who have all of the instinctive needs and ambitions of humans, but none of the empathy or decorum. Easily one of the most terrifying forces ever unleashed on this earth.
MUTATION: Yes, they are all 4-5 feet tall but just still act like babies.
FAVORITE BEVERAGE: Milk.
BATTLE TACTICS: Using their really sharp little fingernails and teeth.

THE SNAKEMEN OF WAUSAU

MAKEUP: Eight guys from Wausau, Wisconsin, who for some reason became immense godlike naga creatures.
QUEZTLCOATL: Perhaps.
TYPICAL CONVERSATION: “Oh hey dere, do ya tink we oughta go out dere and do a big cullin’ of da weak, er no?”
“Oh yaaah, I s’pose it’s ’bout dat time.”
“Yaah. And it’s so nice outside today. Be a shame if we just sat on our keisters dis whole day.”
“Oh yaah. Gotta cull da weak on a day like today.”
FAVORITE APPETIZER: Cheese curds.

PHOENIX SOCIETY

Leader: An impossibly positive man, one who can’t admit defeat.
Project: To restore the old world order, Capitalism and all.
Dress: Polo shirts and buzzcuts. Easily the worst look of all time.
Adherents: The easily duped, the get-rich-quick type who quickly check out whenever questions of mortality or morality come up.

Eventually, one of these gangs will inherit the earth. We’d like to imagine the eschaton coincides with or own death, but this is probably not the case. The end of the world happens very slowly, and it’s laborious. The world has in fact ended several times, but its’ so gradual that we don’t even realize it’s happening. The Anomaly watches into us as we try to go about our day to day lives. The strange becomes familiar and we watch the sky as it loses answers, tries to tell us that we’re not equipped to understand it.

The world has ended many times. Maybe once it will end for the better.

You ever find yourself in a strange place and with strange thoughts? Like in a terribly sun-filled laundromat at 2 PM on a Saturday afternoon. And of course there’s a family in the corner doing a heap of laundry that’s seven feet tall, and the mom is talking on speakerphone with someone while not paying attention to her five kids, who are chasing each other around and eating handful after handful of years-old Reese’s Pieces from the little vending machine. In the corner there’s a TV mounted up by the ceiling that is playing like, ESPN4. And for lack of anything else to occupy yourself, you end up watching it. It’s playing something so narrow-interest and odd that you are a bit dumbfounded that it even exists. Something like “The 2024 Medium Craft Motorboat Racing Finals Presented by Liquid Death.” And you go “What?”

The announcers are talking like it’s a real thing, too. “Here we are in beautiful Clearwater Beach, Florida for the time-honored tradition of the Medium Craft Motorboat Racing Finals, brought to us this year by our friends at Liquid Death Premium Beverages. Of course the atmosphere is electric here, as the great Swede, Wolter Ruhndt tries to win his unprecedented fourth consecutive championship. But nipping on his heels is Italy’s favorite son, Vincent D’nofrio. No relation.” The water a harsh contrast of blue and blazing white reflection. All the boat racers have on jumpsuits with corporate sponsor patches and also sunglasses and spiky gelled hair. On the shore there are bleachers, and people are in the bleachers? People go to watch this shit? Who buys a ticket for a motorboat race? Surely, this are all just like, immediate family members of the participants, right? As the camera pans over the crowd, you can see all of also sunglass, spike-haired family members lean to each other. If you can read lips, you would see they’re asking “How long does this go for? This is like a 2 hour deal right? Are we gonna get something to eat after?”

Who is this for? And how do you even discover that you’re a world championship caliber boat racer? Maybe I am. Who knows? Maybe I have the prototypically perfect genetic disposition to be an elite boat racer. But I just never tried it. Instead it’s all these strange European trust fund kids. These fourth generation descendants of some long-dead aluminum baron from Brussels, who made his fortune selling low-quality canteens and chow trays to both sides of World War One.

Which reminds me, did you know that the Illumanti have a weather control machine? The power elite who secretly run the world have some sort of a mechanism that can control the weather around the globe. I’m not sure how it works, but they use it for nefarious means like to start the wildfires in Los Angeles, and to direct hurricanes at cities like Houston. Makes me wonder, though. Who, exactly, is in charge of it? I mean, it’s the New World Order, sure, but like, who has final say? Or is it like a conference room in an office building, where you book it by making an event in a shared Microsoft Outlook calendar? Like some dipshit son of an arms dealer tries to reserve the weather control machine with a note like “I’m taking my mistress to Madrid from May 3rd through the 8th, so I need it to be about 75-80 degrees, sunny, and with whatever humidity is comfortable (I don’t know that shit I’m not a nerd lol!) Thanks in advance!” And then can he get overruled by some higher-up in the world Satanic cabal? Like some Canadian tech billionaire who is higher in the ranks can be like “No, I can’t let you take the weather control machine for those dates. I need it. This jackass that I was in Skull and Bones with who always made fun of my weight is getting married in Aspen that weekend, so I need to make it freezing rain. Request denied.”

Makes life interesting, I guess. Interesting in the way that so much is mundane, but there is always something just a little bit out of sight that is truly strange. Know what I mean? Like there’s a lot of boring, ho-hum stuff but then every once in a while something completely novel shows up and you go “Woah!” That’s terrifying! That’s beautiful! Aaah!

Let me explain by way of example; The Sandown Clown incident occurred on the Isle of Wight in the UK back in 1973. Most people haven’t heard of this bit of High Strangeness, but it’s up there with Mothman for one of my favorites. See, these two little British kids, who were no doubt quite pale and had bad teeth, were playing around in the woods one day. They ventured a little bit farther into the wood than normal, and crossed a wooden footbridge over a stream. There, in a clearing, they saw a very unusual being.

He was like a psychedelic wiccan Tinman. “A cross between a clown, a robot, and an alien,” according to the reports. About the size and shape of a man, but with a perfectly spherical head on which his facial features seemed crudely painted on with bright primary colors. His “skin” was like off-white paper, and his clothes were like a ramshackle scarecrow’s. A motley of vibrant mismatched patterns and patches. His hands and feet were round, with only three long digits protruding out of each, like a child’s drawing.

The freakish British children approached this equally freakish creature and cautiously asked who he was. The creature replied “Hello and I am all colors, Sam.” He seemed to speak through some kind of a microphone or vocoder type thing which he held up to his mouth, and then the speaker was in a satchel that was slung over his shoulder in a little messenger bag. The children described Sam’s demeanor as one that was reserved but friendly. He was shy, but not cagey. They interacted with him for about a half an hour. The children left, going back to their house, hoping to get their equally pale and freakish British parents to come meet this fourth dimensional harlequin. But when they brought their parents to this magical clearing, Sam was gone. No trace of him was left.

I’m giving a very brief rundown of the Sandown Clown mythos, but it is really interesting. The kids were trying to work out what exactly he was, and one of them asked “Are you a ghost?”, to which he apparently replied “Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way.”

Now the logical part of me knows this story is probably hokum. A story made up by some goofy kids. That’s probably what it is. But I do think it’s interesting in two ways. One, there’s a lot of detail in it. Two, there’s a relative level of restraint if it’s a kid making stuff up. Like, at no point does Sam take the kids on his rocketship to the moon where they meet a bunch of giraffes and eat ice cream, or whatever. Know what I mean? It was probably just an imaginative kid spinning a well-told yarn. But maybe it wasn’t. That maybe is what’s lurking just outside of the mundane day-to-day.

It’s just like the other day at work, I went to get a cup of coffee. I went to the machine and it was empty. Now the impetus was on me to make a new pot. As a new employee, who doesn’t now the foibles and charms of this coffee machine, it means a lot of guesswork. How many scoops of grounds? Do they want me to use the filtered water out of the Brita in the fridge, or is this iron-rich tap water good enough? Can I just stick the coffee pot back in it’s normal place, or is there some trick to where the coffee-drip nipple has to be aligned a certain way? I imagine burbling black water pouring like tar over each side of the coffee pot onto the nice hardwood breakroom floor, the overhead lights flickering just because, and one of my coworkers turning to me with disdain screaming “How could you do this?!” as I helplessly gasp like a shorecaught trout.

So yeah that’s why I’m glad I don’t have to go to the laundromat anymore.